'Fixing' the UN would only make matters worse

David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen (subscription required)

"The United Nations celebrated its 60th anniversary this week with one of its giant confabs by Turtle Bay, kicked off with addresses from U.S. President George W. Bush and others. According to the program notes, this "World Summit" was to the purpose of reforming the venerable organization, so that it might better tackle terrorism, poverty, political oppression, recurring genocide and similar global inconveniences.

As usual, the result was a farce. [Ed.]

The various large voting blocs, consisting of alliances between numerous poor, backward countries under unaccountable, irremovable, dictatorial regimes, led the way in blocking each western proposal in their usual way.

We have the Arab League, the Islamic Conference, the African group, and the Non-Aligned Movement, whose overlapping memberships create a working majority in the UN General Assembly. They vote with disciplined consistency to prevent anything being done that might advance such causes as democracy, free trade, legal transparency, bureaucratic accountability or the defence of the most elementary human rights. They were able to prevent passage, this time, even of a resolution that would condemn in principle the gratuitous slaughter of civilians. This on the argument of Arab states that it might benefit Israel in some way.

Anything that is achieved is done through the Security Council, where for now the membership is restricted, and urgent business can be piloted by the combined action of the five founding permanent members (an artifact of the victory parade at the end of the Second World War). And yet the single most earnestly proposed reform is to wash this out with new permanent members.

The massive bureaucracy which the United Nations sustains, at its headquarters and in its sprawling regional offices, notoriously does more harm than good to anything it touches. Even the defensive Volcker Report, on UN management of the vast oil-for-food fraud that preserved Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq while laundering money on a globally unprecedented scale, gives hint of the degree of corruption. Other investigations, brought through western pressure, have exposed the role of United Nations peacekeeping missions in spreading prostitution and child abuse in places they have been sent. And many UN health and aid programs achieve counter-productive results, usually from ideological motivations.

While dictators in the Third World, and liberal politicians and pressure groups in the West, continue to affirm some mysterious "moral authority," the reality is that the United Nations has evolved into a gargantuan lobby to resist the spread of democracy and constitutional government, protect established criminal behaviour and advance utopian projects that no electorate on earth has ever supported.

The current secretary-general, Kofi Annan, whose own brother and son have been implicated in the oil-for-food scandal (along with a cross-section of his most senior bureaucrats), is the ultimate author of "reform" proposals that do not merely ignore the known causes of corruption and ineptitude, but would enlarge the possibilities for them, by spawning extravagant new layers of unaccountable bureaucracy.

In an important article in The Spectator this week, the exiled Canadian journalist Mark Steyn did the best job I have yet seen in adumbrating the whole mess (in more words than I have at my disposal this morning). It is a great pity we can no longer read him in much of the Canadian mainstream media, for in addition to his celebrated wit, he has the grasp of events, and horse-sense to make him unquestionably our country's leading journalist. If you can find it, go read: "There is no cure for the UN." [Ed.]

Here's the nub. Were serious reform of the United Nations accomplished, it would be turned from an ineffective anti-American and anti-western organization, into an effective anti-American and anti-western organization. That is absolutely inevitable from the membership structure, with its voting blocs. So, better a United Nations that continues in a state of abject dysfunction, than one that can be more efficiently evil.

Back to me. It would follow, on the usual paradoxical principle, that it was rather dumb of President Bush to send, as the new American representative, John Bolton. He is a man committed to making the UN work, and whose reputation portends he will press for reform effectively. That is dumb, for precisely the opposite reason from that presented ad nauseam by the liberal media, Democrats, Euros, leftists, etc. They thought it made no sense to appoint a man who would resist their own consensus.

But perhaps, by further paradox, the critics will turn out to be right, and Mr Bolton the obstructionist will make consensus on any effective reform of the UN impossible. In which case, praise the Lord. "